Weekend Writing Warriors, Tourist Trap

It’s Sunday again, time for Weekend Writing Warriors (click the logo above) and Snippet Sunday (click the logo below.) As I said last week, snippets will be random for a while, and this one is from my second published book, Tourist Trap. The setting is Falaron, a planet terraformed to resemble Earth during the Pleistocene, and the animal is a flat-headed peccary, common in Pleistocene North America and considerably larger than any peccary now alive. A herd has invaded the travelers’ campsite while they slept, and a young sow has gotten her head caught while trying to get the last of a bucket of honey.

They dived in from opposite sides of the mad, blind creature, shoulders brushing as Timi’s weight collapsed the animal’s hindquarters and Roi landed atop the shoulders. The peccary’s frantic squeals, amplified and directed by the bucket, reverberated in Roi’s ears, and its odor was rank in his nostrils. Its coat was as rough and bristly as it looked, harsh against his hands and arms.

It wasn’t totally blinded, Roi saw. The handle if the bucket was caught behind the sow’s ears, and the eyes were set so high in the skull that he could see them, rolling wildly, from where he lay. But it could not see ahead of itself. Roi opened his mind and used his physical contact with the animal to force his own awareness into the animal mind, controlling its struggles and he had quieted the three horses during the storm. “Hang on to the rear legs until I tell you to let go,” he told Timi, and began struggling to get the handle of the bucket back over the flathead’s ears.

Tourist Trap is available in hard cover, soft cover, and ebook at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. For some reason I can’t get through to Amazon that I’ve lowered the ebook price to below $5, so the Kindle version is ridiculously expensive relative to the Nook or the publisher price. Complain to Amazon; they aren’t listening to me.

Next weekend Horse Power will be free on Amazon, and I’ll have a little more of the stampede.

I just submitted the “Found this at a lower price” form on Amazon. If you look at the bottom of the “Product Details” section on The Tourist Trap page, you will see the found at lower price? question. Click on it and add the B&N price and url. I’ve been told that if enough people do that, Amazon will drop their price to match.

I didn’t create the animals in Tourist Trap. They are all well known to paleonologists, though many are extinct. It is thought that flat-headed peccaries, for instance, overlapped with black bears in their ecological niche, and with the close of the Pleistocene only one could survive. So I’ve made mine as much of a camp pest as black bears are today, while black bears are locally extinct.

As I said, I have not managed to get across to Amazon that the publisher price was lowered to under $5 6 months ago. (iUniverse sets the default price for e-books far too high, but I finally argued them down.) Barnes and Noble and iUniverse both have more reasonable prices, so please complain to Amazon–they aren’t listening to me.

I have a system where empathic abilities (shared emotions and sensations) and esper abilities (mind reading, teleportation, telekineses) are both possible, but are to a large extent separate. Roi has both in high degree, to the point that he has a really hard time blocking emotions.